The protruding wall around the fireplace needs to be wallpapered or painted with dense motifs or tiled with stone/brick textured tiles or ply. Re-doing your fireplace will drastically change the look of your living room. See photos below. Consider painting the frames of your doors and sliding doors in the living room and kitchen a dark brown to match the floating shelf over the fireplace. Do not decide what you want to do in poor lighting as you have provided in the photos. Wine is a good color to consider. Also think of darker colors like plum and have different shades on each wall (from the same color family). So maybe think of wine- plum- magenta or wine - oxblood-blood red, etc. whichever suits your taste.

Hi minnie101, Thanks so much for your detailed reply. Great to know what colour that grey is. It may be a little dark with our floor. We will definitely update the handles - I hate the current ones. We'll probably go with wood to keep within budget. Your non-tiles pic is lovely. We'll probably keep some tiles and try to keep the kitchen a little more modern than country kitchen, which might be a challenge with wood. The room faces south. I like your idea of dividing it with paint. We probably will go with white in the kitchen and then 1/2 slightly darker tones in the tv-couch area. The 'other' entrance into the dining area is narrowed by a non-structural wall, so we should remove this to open it properly or like you say, close it off. Maybe not close it off entirely as we'd lose a lot of light, but maybe put in a counter or breakfast bar if space allowed. I love your pendant light suggestions over the dining table. Details like this and a rug in the couch area will really help divide the room as at the moment it is one big cavernous space. I really can't decide yet what way the couches should face - into a tv in the corner, or out into the room like you suggest. We'll have to draw out some chalk outlines on the floor and see how much space there actually is. Colour-wise we like the idea of keeping walls and cabinets quite stark, the wood counter will add a bit of warmth, and then adding colour with couches, rugs and possibly dining chairs. I've attached a couple of pieces of furniture I like. Some may not work, but we'll figure it out.

A few things I would change from experience...instead of a single and double door I would spend the extra money and put in a bifold corner section...would open up the space so much more. as for the kitchen...completely flip your design...put your breakfast bar closer to the window...make it large and multipurpose with the hob in it and then put your main band of cabinets either left, right or behind? We have recently restructured our existing cabinets to this layout and put in new countertops and it works far better than before!

So I think we have decided to stick with the layout that we have and just block up the double doors. I hope it and it will be nice because I have lost a lot of sleep worrying about it. Thanks for letting me post here.